Were your choice of games limited as a child?

With my son I am also keeping similar rules but may require more time constraint on how much he can play. Typically he plays online games (like car racing, monkey quest etc) that are all non violent in nature. However, he does watch me play games like GTA IV, Gears of War, Uncharted series, SSFIVAE, MW3, BF3. I ofcourse coach him that this is just a game and you should never attempt anything of this sort in real life. He is pretty smart and understands that.

Possibly the only games I didn't allow him to see are L.A. Noire (too much blood, death, nudity) and Mortal Kombat (again same issue) and/or blood / abusive / nudity fests like Duke Nukem Forever, Rage etc.
 
My parents allowed me to play Mortal Kombat on the Sega Genesis :D
They probably had no idea how violent that game was. But no harm done really. I'm 26 now and still haven't turned into a serial killer yet
 
My whole neighborhood would sit around the TV playing Mortal Kombat... The only time we got "limited" was when we started fighting for the controller and a parent heard us.

If you were "limited" from video games as a kid, you're a loser ;)
 
Interesting to see the demographic here.;)

My "games" were limited to Monopoly, checkers,chess,and various sports card games as well as the good old rod-controlled hockey and vibrating football.

If I wanted "action" I had a giant box full of plastic molded army men and vehicles.

We actually went outside and played sports and rode our bicycles.

If my mom "called" me, she was standing on the front porch screaming it was time to come home for dinner.:eek:
 
Yes. Actually it was bit wavy. Most of the time they allowed mild violence, though sometimes they got holierthanthou spikes where they were very against all kinds of violence. Luckily these periods passed, propably because I was so calm child so their worries went away. They were propably influenced by some antivideogame propaganda or something...

They did restrict very violent games though, and having religious upbringing I do understand why. I couldnt have even dreamed of owning games (or playing openly) like Mortal Kombat and Doom back then, but still I always found a way to play them. In friends house for example, or when my parents were not at home. >:)
 
My mom was super strict on this when I was younger. About the time I was 10 or so, I got her to budge on a few T games (Tomb Raider is one that I recall), but not a single Mature game. My cousin got to play them (same age), so when I wanted to play things like GTA or Mortal Kombat I'd just do it at his house.

About the time I turned 15, my parents opened me a checking account with a debit card, and it become open season. I'd just order them myself online and make sure I beat my mother to the mail. For the first few ones, I even printed up new DVD jackets with a T instead of an M rating :p. By the time I hit 16, she gave up, and I no longer had to worry about M games. Took long enough...
 
I played pretty much everything. I started on the Intellivison and then followed through with the whole series of Sega consoles.
 
I was heavily limited as a child due to my mother's firm hand on the family (dad didn't care what we played as long as we kept it to a low roar), so no games depicting gore, severe violence, 'suggestive themes' (mom flipped when my brother brought home Battle Arena Toshinden and saw the leather-wearing whip-wielding character), but she was okay with 'comic violence' such as TMNT (both the cartoon and the video games) or the Mario Bros. type games. Only got my Mortal Kombat fix at the arcades (man I miss arcades .. :( )

I think once she started to lose her faith in religion is when I was able to really get some good games ;)
 
No limits here. I played everything and loved the gore in video games. I would choose the goriest and violent games like Soldier of Fortune, Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto 3 on purpose. Eventually it got to the point where if I started to play games like Zelda or Mario my mom would be like "Why are you playing those nice games? I thought you liked the bloody ones." I was 9. :p
 
Not really I could play pretty much what I wanted. My Dad brought home an Atari 2600 when I was 5 or 6 and told me to have fun. :)

When Mortal Kombat came out though my mom was a little iffy on it, but still let me play it. I think most parents were like that when that game came out. It was a great moment in gaming history.
 
Ya I couldnt play and games with a rating higher than teen. One of my first memories was me having to sneak on to my dads pc to play Wolf 3d:D
 
Games were pretty lax for me as a kid since there wasn't any really violent games on Atari/NES. By the time I got a Genesis I was in middle school and my parents didn't care. Didn't have a PC until I built my own when I was 17, so by then there was no game I wouldn't play.

For my kids, the oldest is allowed to just about anything (14yo). He has the orange box, DeathSpank, Garry's Mod, Borderlands, etc and I recently initiated him into the 80's gore fest action movies (RoboCop anyone?). Our 11 yo is still pretty screwed down when it comes to games, only because she hasn't shown any real maturity yet to be able to handle more adult themes. Our limits are based on their actions and not their age.
 
I grew up when Doom and whatnot was being released. My dad said, "Hey let's check out Duke Nukem and Quake." I immediately downloaded the shareware versions of those, especially Quake. My dad played Doom but I couldn't play until I beat Duke Nukem. I downloaded Quake when it was released on AOL. The gaming section on AOL exploded with Quake. So much people "chatting" about it in chatrooms.

So uh, yeah. No worries on violence haha.
 
I didn't play video games as a child. My interests were action figures and models and playing outside. I had everything Star Wars back in the days. The Millennium Falcon, the Death Star, the Star Destroyer, bedsheet, curtains, wallpapers, every figures, every ship, every vehicles, every creatures. Oh how I cry myself to sleep every night that I didn't take better care of my toys as a child.

When I'm done building my time machine I'm going back to the past and rescue all of my Star Wars toys before that little brat opens his Christmas presents. The fucker.

Seriously though, video games weren't popular when I was a child. They didn't start becoming mainstream until I was in my teens except in pizza parlors and arcades.
 
I remember being in middle school and going to the arcade to play Mortal Kombat 2. I used to play that game so much that I would have a line on the other side of the machine filled with college students. I would just cycle through them, kicking their asses one after the other. Thankfully these days, smoking is not allowed in the arcade because people would try to blow it in your eyes during an intense part of the fight.

I got to know the people that worked in the arcade and they eventually would just unlock the Mortal Kombat 2 machine and tap the little switch on the inside, normally struck by inserting quarters, to give me 20+ credits at a time. Those were the days!

Before that though, I used to play Doom, Heretic, and Duke Nukem on my mom's computer (hey, I was in elementary school!). I'm sure she saw me playing Doom but I don't think she cared. I'm guessing she didn't mind because I spent the overwhelming majority of my time playing outside with friends, biking around the city, and not coming home until after dusk.
 
Krenum said:
Not really I could play pretty much what I wanted. My Dad brought home an Atari 2600 when I was 5 or 6 and told me to have fun. :)

When Mortal Kombat came out though my mom was a little iffy on it, but still let me play it. I think most parents were like that when that game came out. It was a great moment in gaming history.
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Yeah, Mortal Kombat was quite controversial. Isn't it one of the games that gave birth to the concept of rating games?
 
No. I could play any game I wanted to. My parents didn't give a shit. I was also allowed to watch just about any movie I wanted to regardless of what it was rated. Porn was right out, but that was about it.
 
I was allowed any game I wanted. My parents could tell I knew what was real and fantasy and let me make my own choices. I would do the same with my children as long as I felt the same way about them.
 
Dan_D said:
No. I could play any game I wanted to. My parents didn't give a shit. I was also allowed to watch just about any movie I wanted to regardless of what it was rated. Porn was right out, but that was about it.
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Heh. My folks where the same. Watch anything or play anything short of porn.

Earliest violent game recall playing and owning: Friday the 13th on C64. If you ever played it, there were these "interupts" in the game that were actually kind of freaky for the time showing somebody being killed.

Then Splatterhouse on Turbographix 16.
Then Wolfenstein/Doom
 
My parents didn't care about the games I played; they let me buy Shadow Warrior despite the depiction of violence on the box. They just didn't want me playing past bed time.
 
robble said:
thanks, i was beginning to feel like the oldest guy here.
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Considering how the title implies anyone who grew up in the 80s and beyond (I am really just going off a generalization which could be wrong), I would be hard-pressed to see why you would feel that way...

I am just poking fun. :p
 
No, not really.

I grew up playing the NES, Genesis, SNES, and PC. There really wasn't much of a concern yet with console games and violence. So my parents didn't bother with looking into a game. I didn't buy PC games back then either. So, they didn't even have a chance to intervene. I just pirated the games I wanted. However, they wouldn't have. My parents were never big on censoring unless it was nudity.
 
they stopped caring when i was like 11. all i used to play though was madden
 
Dan_D said:
No. I could play any game I wanted to. My parents didn't give a shit. I was also allowed to watch just about any movie I wanted to regardless of what it was rated. Porn was right out, but that was about it.
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ahh reminds of me the lectures i use to get about porn because my mother thought she was sneaky getting on my computer and looking at all my files while i was at school.. best part was laughing at her when she'd open a file that looked like a porn title(because i changed the file names and of course changed all the titles of the porn to legit movie/tv show titles) and it ended up being a movie. gotta love parents sometimes..
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
ahh reminds of me the lectures i use to get about porn because my mother thought she was sneaky getting on my computer and looking at all my files while i was at school.. best part was laughing at her when she'd open a file that looked like a porn title(because i changed the file names and of course changed all the titles of the porn to legit movie/tv show titles) and it ended up being a movie. gotta love parents sometimes..
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You had porn a computer that your mother could access... :bleh:
 
Nope. Just had to get straight A's baby! SHOW THEM THE A! Then again, I used to just play Mario and Duck Hunt. Then came my new SEA console and it was just SONIC...SONIC...SONIC...SONIC...SONIC...SONIC.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
ahh reminds of me the lectures i use to get about porn because my mother thought she was sneaky getting on my computer and looking at all my files while i was at school.. best part was laughing at her when she'd open a file that looked like a porn title(because i changed the file names and of course changed all the titles of the porn to legit movie/tv show titles) and it ended up being a movie. gotta love parents sometimes..
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When I was a kid we didn't have a computer in the house. Even if we did, watching a movie on one wasn't feasable.
 
Dan_D said:
When I was a kid we didn't have a computer in the house. Even if we did, watching a movie on one wasn't feasable.
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Exactly.

My first computer could fit movie clips on it but nothing more. A whole movie with only 850MB to work with, yeah right.
 
I'd have to say yes, since Willy The Worm was just about the only thing I had. It expanded when the Nintendo was introduced but my family would not buy any other system until then for the life of them.
 
I didnt even have a TV in the house until I was 13. yep Dad didnt want one...damn hippy. On the plus side, i read every book the library had.

True story
 
Ryan5508 said:
I was allowed any game I wanted. My parents could tell I knew what was real and fantasy and let me make my own choices. I would do the same with my children as long as I felt the same way about them.
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Ditto. Sheltering kids retards maturity and thus development.
 
I'm not going to say my parents "didn't give a shit", they most certainly cared, however even when I was very little my parents trusted me to do the right thing. They didn't need to tell me to not do things or not to watch/play inappropriate things.

Also, from a young age I saved up money to buy games. My parents didn't often buy games for me. Even for Christmas/birthdays, they didn't want to buy me or the rest of my siblings things like video games, they always bought us things to get us out of the house. They bought me bows and arrows, bikes, fishing gear, sports equipment, etc. If we wanted video games, we saved our own money and bought them ourselves, and once we'd saved our money, it was ours and they wouldn't tell us what we could or couldn't buy with it.

I guess that's why it makes me sick when you see little shits in shops dragging their parents around and the parents caving in and buying whatever the kid wants. I like kids, I hate parents.
 
Fortunately when I was a kid, my dad was a gamer and still is to this day. So growing up, violent games were the norm.


My Dad, brother and I game on Xbox Live on our weekends off with BF3/CoD. :)
 
My dad raised me to know the difference between real life and fantasy. There was not exactly a restriction on what I played or watched as long as it was within my ethical range. If I watched a movie with tons of violence it better be about good crushing evil. Nudity didn't matter unless it was sexual in nature, which I guess isn't exactly appropriate for a kid. I mostly played NES and SNES games until I was in high school when I got to build a computer. My first PC games were quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and doom. I really laugh at all the parents and politicians who think video games make kids serial killers etc. I played those violent games so I wouldn't become a serial killer. Better to shoot pixels than people, right? Now I'm a pacifist, vegetarian environmentalist, and I still love killing things in video games.
 
When I grew up, parents having to pay attention to their kids games was a 100% non issue. My parents restricted my TV and other stuff but it never once crossed their mind to restrict video games.
 
Before the rating system came out my mother made sure to monitor what I was playing and look into games I wanted. As soon as the ESRB came about she limited me to T and under games. I did find ways to play more mature games at friend's though.
 
Hell, when i was a kid, i had to write my own damn games. IN BASIC! :D

Seriously, my first computer was a TRS-80 model 1 with a whopping 16K of memory and a tape drive. I had to learn assembly to make any decent games.
 
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